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UC Online efforts profiled in SF Chronicle - ouch!

It's tough to compete with free -- that's one of the points of "UC online courses fail to lure outsiders," by Nanette Asimov in the January 8th San Francisco Chronicle. The appeal of UC credits is apparently not enough to overcome the relatively high prices of $1400 to $2400 per course, particularly when compared with free MOOCs which don't offer credit. After a year, only one student from outside the UC system has enrolled in any of the UC Online course offerings, although 4 more have recently registered.

The one class from UC Online highlighted in the article is from UC Riverside:

In a demonstration of UC Online, Williams powered up Professor Jacqueline Shey-Murphy's online course "Dance Cultures and Context," which attracted more than 120 students last quarter at UC Riverside. Shey-Murphy introduced the class on video, with the syllabus and calendar at left. Students joined in "synchronous discussions" - a chat room - each Friday.
Developing interactive courses that meet the UC academic standards and can be offered at a cost savings compared with face-to-face classes is challenging. I think the ability for students to interact with UC faculty has to be the selling point of any UC online effort, but it is also a big part of the challenge. Finding computational or crowdsourced solutions to grading and interaction, as has been done with MOOCs, seems to go against the UC agenda for online classes. On the other hand, large class sizes are where cost savings are most likely to come from and these present the biggest challenge to instructor-student interaction. MOOCs will have to change eventually if they are going to become profitable -- right now the production and overhead costs that are making things difficult for the UC Online effort are not really a concern for MOOCs.


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